Tech

As I’m trying to improve the performance of the mit 100k website/server delivery, I find myself comparing the performance of different cdn’s and hosting plans. They all have tips on how to use CDNs to cache your content all over the world, which is good, but with average response times of 400ms after cdn-caching \cite{http://www.husdal.com/2011/07/01/incapsula-versus-cloudflare/}\cite{http://www.husdal.com/2011/05/28/cloudflare-or-cloudfront-who-wins/}, I can’t help but think that we’re... Read more →

So I got a swanky new phone with my switch from AT&T to Verizon. AT&T super-sucked, and before that, T-Mobile seemed to be more interested in treating me like a common criminal than a customer. Good Riddance to them both. Verizon of course is super expensive, and while I was grandfathered in on an unlimited data plan with ATT, I have to... Read more →

Did you know that once upon a time, in a former life (aka undergrad), I used to do digital hardware & PCB design? I had forgotten that until I (somewhat accidentally) happened upon my old umich webpage. Suffice it to say, I was a little embarrassed by what was written on it, and the contemptibly half-written and half-thought through ideas upon it... Read more →

I was just lamenting to a friend that I wished that Hans Reiser hadn’t gone to jail or hadn’t killed his wife, or that whole sequence of events hadn’t taken place, and the next version of reiserfs could come out instead. Honestly, I’m not entirely convinced that he did the act, I certainly wasn’t there, and at least the evidence made public... Read more →

In this post, I’m not going to talk ad-nauseum about all the little tweaks you can do to improve MySQL performance (my.cnf memory optimizations, to getting an SSD (do it, it lowers random access time for table-row lookups), to the different ways to execute joins using keys). I assume everyone is familiar with SQL and EXPLAIN types to queries to get access... Read more →

I wrote my brother an email about how much my old Asus laptop sucked and how much better my new laptop is… This new Lenovo that I took forever configuring and deciding on is a million billion times better than my old laptop and everyone elses’ in the world combined, including those people with Lenovos… Now, just to elucidate how preposterous this... Read more →

After a year and a half of using my wholeheartedly inadequate Asus U50F, I started to realize that I needed a new laptop. Gradually I had started to feel that I would rather shoot myself in the head than use my Asus to do ANYTHING, and while I had generally chalked that up to hating computers in general and thinking they are... Read more →

Whenever I am trying to figure out additional ways to improve my already solved problem of high speed content delivery, I procrastinate by reading benchmarks of Nginx, Cherokee, and Linux tcp performance tweaks. In this delicate dalliance, I find myself reading lots of blog posts by Morons who seem to think that “their solution” to web content delivery is the Starship to... Read more →

So I’m out to configure a new computer, partly one for me, partly one for my brother, and I find myself on the MacBook Pro page configuring a machine there . Now I know on the surface why Macs tend to be more expensive than windows machines. That is, if we subtract away the Macs-Fanboi-Love premium, we still find them to cost... Read more →

I mean seriously??? What clusterf*ck minded person keeps reducing the screen area with every release to load the damn interface with more and more useless tools??? I mean, honestly, I can see why Jeff is always saying that Gmail beats the crap out of its competition. I mean, google even has enough space left over to ADVERTISE TO ME! But thunderbird, ohhh... Read more →